50 years ago this protester spent 62 days fasting in Cincinnati jail. She's still got game.

DeCourcy Squire, center, the 18-year-old antiwar demonstrator from Antioch College, refused to eat solid food from the time of her imprisonment Dec. 8, 1967 until her release Feb. 10, 1968. She is shown her with her mother, Lurline Squire of Morgantown, W. Va., on the day on her release.(Photo: Enquirer archive)

She never intended to get arrested. DeCourcy Squire came to Cincinnati to pass out leaflets and talk to people about the war in Vietnam. Getting arrested, put in jail and fasting for 62 days in solitary confinement was not the plan.

Like those who publicly protest today, people took sides. Instead of Facebook and Twitter, the conflict played out in the editorial pages of newspapers and out in the streets.

Weeks of public pressure, headlines and vigils ended 50 years ago last month with the Cincinnati Pardon and Parole Board letting Squire go home early.

She was just a sophomore at Antioch College at the time.

In early December 1967, there were more than half a million Americans in Vietnam. A month earlier about 1,800 of them were killed in the Battle of Dak To.

Squire traveled with her schoolmates from Yellow Springs, Ohio to Cincinnati. On Dec. 6, they gathered in front of Downtown's federal building, an imposing cube of limestone and glass built just five years earlier. They began passing out leaflets against the war.

Squire, a retired physical therapist now living in Minneapolis, remembers that “Cincinnati was not a particularly receptive city to our presence. So we didn’t engage in a lot of discussion.”

Antioch hippies had already developed a reputation for protests and anti-war activities among those living in more traditionally conservative parts of the state.

Despite this, Squire struck up a friendly conversation with a school teacher. Meanwhile, some young men began heckling the demonstrators.

Police had been hovering around and hecklers brought them close. Officers began separating the protesters from everyone else. When they tried to tell the teacher Squire was speaking with to move along, the college sophomore spoke up and said they were just talking.She didn't want the teacher to be removed.

“The police kind of lit up at that,” Squire said.

“Oh great, you don’t want us here?” an officer rhetorically asked. Then Squire said the police turned to the hecklers and said, “Come on back!”

The police left and things took a violent turn. Squire said young men turned violent, punching and kicking her fellow protesters, she said.

“We all sat down to seem less threatening and be safer closer to the ground,” Squire said.

The scuffles went on until after dark, then a soldier in uniform walked by.

“Come over here and look at what these people are doing,” the hecklers shouted.

“I’m just back from Vietnam,” the soldier said. “These people are asking why we’re in Vietnam, and I don’t know why we’re in Vietnam.”

Then he sat down with the protesters.

“It was just a stunning moment,” Squire said. “Everyone just started talking, even the hecklers.

They asked the protesters why they didn’t fight back. Squire and her friends explained the principles of non-violence: Seeking friendship and understanding, defeating injustice instead of people, choosing love instead of hate.

Thetwo disparate groups talked about protesting. They talked about the war. They talked until dawn.

This was what the protesters had hoped for:Meaningful, polite, civil conversation. It was going well.

Moved to sit

The next morning, more protesters showed up to conduct a sit-in inside the federal building. Squire remained outside passing out leaflets. A sit-in meant arrests and Squire did not plan on getting arrested.

Cincinnati police showed up with vans, prepared to make multiple arrests. Squire watched as her fellow protesters were pulled and carried from the building.

Then something changed.

“The night before, all of that time we spent talking, had made me really feel that non-violence was possible. That there was a way of changing each other,” Squire said. “The importance of dialogue and talking just made it seem so wrong, these people being dragged off to jail, that I sat down in front of the paddy wagons. That’s how I got arrested.”

For her age, she was a seasoned activist. Two years earlier, after pleading for permissionwith her mother, the two had spent the summer teaching literacy in southwest Tennessee to African-Americans so they could pass literacy tests and vote.

Squire had been raised a Quaker and discussing racial justice and peace. She said she was influenced by the previous generation of activists: labor organizers and those against Jim Crow laws.

Steeped in this world, Squire had strong beliefs regarding the police and judicial system.

“The idea was non-cooperation with an unjust system, that was not just unjust in arresting people for protesting,” she said, “But for just the kind of racial discrimination, economic discrimination, the repressive role that it was playing in suppressing dissent.”

It is no surprise then that Squire went limp when the officers arrested her. She refused to walk into the courtroom at her arraignment. She refused to give her name to the judge. When supporters began paying the bonds of the other student who were arrested, she declined.

The charges piled up. On the contempt of court charge alone, she was sentenced to nine months and sent to Cincinnati Workhouse. (Already a century-old in 1968, the Workhouse was an archetypal jail, later to star in films for its stereotypical look.)

That's when Squire stopped eating solid food. She survived the next 62 days on vitamins and water.

“I was in solitary confinement when I was there,” Squire said. “There was no toilet in the room. You just had a bucket, not even a bucket with a cover, just an open bucket.”

She was given two books: The Bible and a calculus book. She said Quaker meetings hadprepared her for the silence and solitude.

Her first trip outside her cell was the only time she was scared.

“They said they were taking me to the hospital and I got there and I realized it was a mental hospital,” Squire said. “There was a moment where I was just terrified that I would end up in a mental hospital and I would be there the rest of my life and not be able to prove I was sane.

“Then I took a deep breath, and thought 'I'm doing what I think is right so I shouldn't be afraid,' and I wasn’t.”

Squire didn't stay in the mental ward of Longview Hospital for long. Back at the workhouse, she was briefly allowed to mingle with other prisoners, but her co-defendants had already posted bond and left.

Outside of the workhouse, news of her fast was spreading. More protesters were arrested in January at a federal building protest. Characterized in The Enquirer as supporters of Squire, many mirrored her actions, sitting down in front of police vehicles and refusing to walk into court.

Her classmates at Antioch launched a hunger strike to support her, and local students from Hebrew Union College joined in.

With public pressure mounting, the Cincinnati Pardon and Parole Commission was convened. Two out of the three members of the commission voted to parole Squire.

That was enough. She could go.

The lack of food had taken its toll. There had been more trips to the hospital where she was allowed see her mother.

Squire was be hospitalized two more times for suspected malnutrition before her release. Her final hospital stay was 12 days long.

For the record,the third vote -- a vote against granting parole -- was offered by a Joseph Link, a Xavier University economic professor.

He said parole should only be granted to those who want to reform. He said Squire made statements she would keep doing the same things that landed her jail.

On that second count, he was right.

Protesters gathered at the Statehouse in Columbus on Jan. 31, 1968 to draw attention to what they called the harsh treatment of DeCourcy Squire.(Photo: Provided/Associated Press)

Undeterred: A life of activism

In 1970, Squire and seven other activists broke into the federal building in Rochester, New York, where they destroyed draft files, removed files about those being prosecuted for draft evasion and attempted to remove files related to the FBI’s COINTEL program.

It would later be determined that COINTELwas designed to infiltrate and disrupt political organizations. Agents were suspectedof spying on everyone from Martin Luther King, Jr. to journalists.

Caught and prosecuted for the attempt at theft and destruction of government property, Squire was sent to federal prison for a year.

COINTEL, led by J. Edgar Hoover, would be exposed in 1971 by a similar group of activists and promptly shut down by the FBI. A Senate committee would later call its surveillance tactics illegal.

Once it became public, evidence was found that the FBI was also attempting to control news media to discredit the messages of activists.

Squire then began to focus on prisons. She worked for various nonprofits including the Boston Bail Fund and did side jobs to fund her activism.

When funding began to dry up for many of her projects, she went back to school to become a physical therapist. She graduated in 1990 at the age of 40 and became engrossed in lymphedema treatment.

Still she protested. Her entire life, she’s been what is called a "war tax resister," that is, she refuses to pay any taxes that could pay for any war.

During the days she worked for nonprofits, it was easy to keep her income low enough to avoid taxes, she said,but as a physical therapist there were years when the IRS garnished her wages.

Last year, she retired at the age of 67 in Minneapolis, as she says, “just in time to resume a more active role in political resistance.”